RSS Feed: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:37, 7 October 2012

RSS stands for either RDF Site Summary or else for Really Simple Syndication; RSS is a format for publishing lists on the web, such as the last posts to a blog, or the latest audio files of a podcast. RSS is designed to make it easy for software, like a "pod catcher" or a feed reader to automatically collect and download information from websites that a user has "subscribed" to. Feeds can be useful to write scripts that use public websites as services to request, for instance, the latest images added to Flickr with a given tag, or to search a set of news sites for their last headlines.

Some examples of public feeds

Flickr json api key? woman man
BBC News "education & family" "business"
Internet Archive
YouTube
Vimeo ("simple api")
A custom Tumblr feed creator (tumblr itself doesn't offer rss feeds)
Open Clip Art

Examples

Die Zeit

A little script to see the current categories of the RSS Feed of german Newspaper "Die Zeit"

http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/~mwocher/cgi-bin/Rss_Zeit6.cgi

!/usr/bin/env python
-*- coding:utf-8 -*-

import cgi

import lxml.etree, urllib2, codecs

print """

 <html>
  
  <head><title>Sample CGI Script</title></head>
  
  <body>

"""

category_1=Politik
category_2=Wirtschaft
category_3=Gesellschaft
category_4=Kultur
category_5=Meinung
category_6=Wissen
category_7=Digital
category_8=Studium
category_9=Karriere
category_10=Lebensart
category_11=Reisen
category_12=Auto
category_13=Sport

Counters

category_1=0 category_2=0 category_3=0 category_4=0 category_5=0 category_6=0 category_7=0 category_8=0 category_9=0 category_10=0 category_11=0 category_12=0 category_13=0

Faktor

Faktor=10

Read from live URL

f = urllib2.urlopen("http://newsfeed.zeit.de/index")

Read from local file

import sys

Read in the XML file

doc = lxml.etree.parse(f)

print """

Gesellschaft

"""

Again brief review of file system paths (absolute vs. relative)
XPATH = super paths for documents, not filesystems!

NS = {

   'media': 'http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/',
   'dc': 'http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/',
   'cc': 'http://creativecommons.org/ns#',
   'atom': 'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom',

}

Doing something which each item individually (maybe extracting the names

for item in doc.xpath("//item"): category = item.xpath(".//category/text()")[0]

if category == "Politik": category_1=category_1+1

if category == "Wirtschaft": category_2=category_2+1

if category == "Gesellschaft": category_3=category_3+1

if category == "Kultur": category_4=category_4+1

if category == "Meinung": category_5=category_5+1

if category == "Wissen": category_6=category_6+1

if category == "Digital": category_7=category_7+1

if category == "Studium": category_8=category_8+1

if category == "Karriere": category_9=category_9+1

if category == "Lebensart": category_10=category_10+1

if category == "Reisen": category_11=category_11+1

if category == "Auto": category_12=category_12+1

if category == "Sport": category_13=category_13+1

print """

Politik

""" print """

Wirtschaft

""" print """

Gesellschaft

""" print """

Kultur

""" print """

Meinung

""" print """

Wissen

""" print """

Digital

""" print """

Studium

""" print """

Karriere

""" print """

Lebensart

""" print """

Reisen

""" print """

Auto

""" print """

Sport

"""

print """</body></html>"""

urls = doc.xpath("//enclosure/@url")

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 Some examples of public feeds
 * [http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/ Flickr] [http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?format=json json] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/86163/why-do-i-need-a-flickr-api-key api key?] [http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=woman woman] [http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=man man]
-* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494 BBC News] [http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/education/rss.xml education & family]
+* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494 BBC News] [http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/education/rss.xml "education &amp; family"] [http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/business/rss.xml "business"]
 * [http://archive.org/help/rss.php Internet Archive]
 * [http://www.youtube.com/t/rss_feeds YouTube]